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Collapsible "Buckliball" turns failure into functionality

Buckliball A toy inspired a new simple 3-D structure that can collapse reversibly. MITThis is a rhombicuboctahedron This squishy ball, inspired by an equally cute kid's toy, is a breakthrough in a new class of three-dimensional structures that can buckle reversibly. It starts out as an inflated sphere, and if you suck the air out of it, it buckles down along its dimples into a smaller ball 46 percent its original size. It looks sort of like a buckyball, so its creators at MIT nicknamed it a "buckliball." Structures that can predictably buckle have several useful applications. You could make a football stadium with an easily collapsible buckly dome, for instance. Or perhaps a soft robot with foldable joints or skin, or maybe small drug-delivering capsules that could morph and twist inside the body, or even synthetic molecules that can buckle just like viruses. A team of engineers at MIT wanted to figure out the simplest 3-D structure that can do this, and they thought of the Hoberman Twist-O, a pretty fun li